Wireless communication networks typically include wireless access systems with equipment such as wireless access, control, and routing nodes that provide wireless communication services for wireless communication devices. A typical wireless communication network includes systems to provide wireless access across a geographic region, with wireless coverage areas associated with individual wireless access nodes. The wireless access systems exchange user communications between wireless communication devices, service providers, and other end user devices. These user communications typically include voice calls, data exchanges, web pages, streaming media, or text messages, among other communication services.
In some communication systems, gateways, such as packet data network gateways (PGWs) and serving gateways (SGWs) are used to manage the communications as they are delivered across the wireless network. For example, a PGW acts as the interface between the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network and other packet data networks, such as the Internet or other session initiation protocol networks, whereas the SGW routes data packets between one or more eNodeBs and the PGW.
As more devices attempt to communicate over a network, various PGWs may experience an increase in load. This increase in load may cause poor throughput and latency to the connected end user devices. Further, although some of the PGWs may be experiencing the increase in load or unavailability in some examples, other PGWs within the same LTE network may have available capacity to handle communications from the wireless devices. Thus, some communications may be impaired despite other communication paths being available to assist the burdened or unavailable PGWs.
Overview
Examples herein provide systems methods and software to manage communication path allocation in a communication network. In one example, a method of operating a mobility management entity to manage communication paths includes transferring a plurality of general packet radio service tunneling protocol (GTP) messages to a plurality of packet data network gateways, and identifying one or more response messages from the plurality of packet data network gateways. The method further includes determining transaction success information for each packet data network gateway in the plurality of packet data network gateways based on the one or more response messages, and altering communication path allocation based on the transaction success information.